Hacker News Reader

Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

A lot of it has to be education too, for exemple in some cultures the outside, ie outside your own place, is seen as more or less a giant trash, so people see no problem dumping their shit even right in front of their own building. In my culture the outside is seen as a common shared place and definitely not a trash, I remember my grandpa telling me not to spit on the ground or to pick up my candy wrappers when I was maybe 4 or 5 years old.

For me it was an objective truth until I moved to a more culturally diverse city, these people are no dumber than I but they simply do not understand my pov

View on HN

To me that blows my mind, not because of viewing the outside as trash, but being content with living in trash. To me the observation, that the outside is a giant trash, would give me a desire to order it.

I have heard this opinion echoed by Indians, the combination of both the outside not being their problem, and thinking someone else (lower caste) will take care of it.

There are city workers and occasionally homeless people who pickup trash (to salvage or sell). I'm not sure how this opinion of theirs is formed but I can assure you nobody is throwing around trash with anything remotely caste related in their mind. It isn't even in consideration.

Its plain old apathy and no sense of responsibility or shared ownership. Outside is just something you share with other 1.4 billion people of the country.

The cycle usually goes like one idiot starts throwing trash, other idiots start adding their trash too, few weeks/months govt workers do a bare minimum job of clean-up, repeat.

what if your efforts are futile due to sheer amount of other people producing trash?

it is not so simple of a problem with clear cut solution.

I'm talking about people spitting in front of the elevator doors, people opening their mail in the common building area and immediately throwing the envelope on the floor, people finishing their drink in front of the building and discarding the bottle by the side of the entrance door

We don't need alien tech to solve these, it's 100% an education issue.

They should be educated, sure, but this can't be an education issue. Rather an issue of crappy upbringing and low intellect or, when it's a cultural thing, crappy culture.

This depends if you only understand learning in school to be education, or if you mean the whole education that a pupil underwent, which I think was the case here. To me upbringing is another word for education.

Then I would use the legal and executive system, to deal with this people. That's why they exist after all.

Most stimuli result in habituation over time. Live with trash long enough and you’ll stop noticing it so much.

That makes sense, but sometimes it's even more confusing than that!

When I lived in Philadelphia here in the USA, it would vary street by street and block by block even when there were no ethnic or economic divides.

One block would have litter all over the place and the next one would be clean. To this day, I am still puzzled by that.

There are some very mundane possible explanations, probably due to a combination of pedestrian traffic patterns and wind. (My observation is that some % of litter, probably a large % IMO, is simply trash that blew out of trashcans as opposed to being intentionally discarded)

Still, I found it baffling and surprising

Reply on news.ycombinator.com